Shirley Jackson

(In theaters, July 1999) Are horror films basically incompatible with the Hollywood blockbuster mentality? This film offers part of the answer. This big-budget, star-studded Haunted-house offering from Dreamworks manages the rare feat of being a completely ordinary horror film without one good scare in it. Aside from a mild jump-shot or two, The Haunting fails at eliciting anything approaching dread from the audience, with disastrous results. In many ways, this is a movie from another time, where you could afford to build up the suspense for an hour before letting it all flow. This approach could have been applauded if The Haunting has done anything worthwhile… but this build-up only elicits impatience rather than tension. The below-average script doesn’t help things, with some particularly bad dialogue (mirroring almost everything the characters feel despite the fact that it’s blindingly obvious to the audience.) and a lack of any sympathy for the characters. Jan de Bont’s direction is far from being as dynamic as I would have expected from his work on Speed and Twister. Catherine Zeta-Jones is as lovely as ever, but she has to fight against the House itself in the looks department. The bad ending finally seals The Haunting‘s rating to, at best, barely average.

(Streaming, June 2025) Twenty-five years later, I come to the 1999 version of The Haunting with a very different perspective informed by having seen the 1963 version, having read Shirley Jackson’s novel and being far more appreciative of classic horror.  Alas, none of this leads me to a more positive appreciation — although there a a few things I do like more about it.  The beginning, for instance, is rather good — never mind a fleeting glimpse of Virginia Madsen in the opening scene, The Haunting is never quite as good as its first half-hour where everything is still possible and the film does seem intent on combining terrific set design with an intention to follow the original novel.  The casting helps a lot — Lili Taylor is really good as the mousy protagonist, Catherine Zeta-Jones fantastic at the outgoing Theo and Liam Neeson makes for a great authority figure. When I read the novel, I couldn’t help but imagine them in the lead roles. (Alas, Owen Wilson is utterly miscast in a badly-written character — I like 1963’s Russ Tamblyn much better.)  The sets are grand and the pacing is such that you can hope for the best.  But then The Haunting takes a turn for the worse by going for a special-effects spectacle at a time when CGI really wasn’t perfect and from source material that’s built on ambiguity.  The final half-hour is grotesque overkill — and I’m not even objecting to the heroic-sacrifice finale. As of this to say that despite a very different path, I still end up twenty-five years with an impression of the 1999 The Haunting that’s no less critical.  It’s not even trashy-fun like the near-contemporary remakes of 13 Ghosts and House on Haunted Hill — it’s just ponderous, misguided and near-useless.  This wasn’t the movie that killed Jan de Bont’s promising career as a director — but it was one of the three strikes (alongside Speed 2 and Lara Croft 2) that earned him early retirement from Hollywood.